Archives For February 2011

>I recently filed bugs 635504 and 635502 in order to make Firefox’s Web Console customizable via the new Addon SDK and to create a global ‘Browser Console’ that lets you peek at all of the activity going on under the hood in Firefox.

The interesting exercise will be cannibalizing the Web Console to create a global console that displays all errors, css parse warnings, network activity and other events. The filtering interface will need even more options to cut through the density of messages. The cool part will be making commands – and perhaps APIs – that give you access to all of the services, observers, browser tabs and other Gecko bits currently running.

Live inspection of these objects will be a powerful tool for those interested in hacking on Firefox, but don’t know how to start.

The first customization of the Web Console we are planning is integration with Rob Campbell’s ‘Workspace’. I would like to see a console and workspace either side-by-side or be able to toggle between them, with the current console automatically providing a logging API.

I find the Workspace is already an essential tool when I start hacking something together – especially in the ‘chrome’ context. The Workspace can save your snippets to files, so any commonly used tools and functions can be used as templates.

If you think of anything that would automate or make easier repeated tasks or techniques you use when hacking web apps or Firefox, let me know.

>For some time now I have been playing with the WeaveCrypto service – now a JavaScript module implemented on top of NSS via jsctypes. It is a pretty easy to use module – thanks in large part to the Weave (now Sync) team, Justin Dolske and many others.

I recently dove back into the code to try and distill down an easy to use API that can be attached as a property to any DOM Window.

The WeaveCrypto API was truncated because Sync started using a better encryption system (J-PAKE) for its purposes, so I had to dig through hg log to find the bits I needed: